Category: ranting

Somewhere deep in my unconscious lurk two demons. Black and white bovine spirits haunt me. Visions of their wedding are burned into dark corners of my mind. Remnants from my first visit to Paris.

It was supposed to be a showing of the original silent era Phantom of the Opera movie, but somewhere, something went horribly wrong. Not speaking enough French to interact with the teller my girlfriend and I purchased two tickets to the evening show at a theater near Les Halles. The poster for the Phantom informed us that there would be a live pianist accompanying the film using the original accompanying score.

When we entered the theater the lights were up but the piano music already filled the room. We found seats near the aisle close to the door, near the back. The theater was full and soon the lights went down.

In the beginning we thought there was a free short film before the main show. Black and white Russian words filled frame after frame—with French translations. Then scenes of a farm, Russian peasants working hard to eek a living from the land.

After 10 minutes we wondered if perhaps we had made a mistake. The theater only had one screen and the tickets did not have the movie name printed on them. After 30 minutes we decide that we must have made a mistake. By now the peasants had received a gift from the communist party: a tractor. And a cow. Soon the nightmare began.

The peasants went to the authorities again this time they were after a bull. When they returned to their village they held a party. Soon the screen was filled with the image of the lowly village cow, a gift to the collective from the central authorities, draped in flowers.

Cut to an image of the bull with bells and flowers hanging from his horns. He turns his head.

Cut to the cow, she sees the bull.

Cut to the bull as he begins walking.

Now the cow is walking.

The bull begins to run.

The cow is running.

Faster

Faster

…and we’re running for the door.

Outside the theater we found the important detail we overlooked in our enthusiasm for the silent Phantom… the show dates were still a few weeks away. We left before our film was over and without knowing the name. But with memories of a bovine wedding that still haunt my dreams.

So I have decided to exercise these demons. After years of wondering what movie I walked out of I have embraced the wonders of the internet and discovered that the movie is called “The General Line” or “Генеральная линия” in Russian [imdb.com]. It was even released in the US under the title “The Old and the New” in 1930, interesting for a Soviet Propaganda film. Turns out it is by Sergei Eisenstein [wikipedia.org] who apparently is a good director, he has several films released by the Criterion Collection [criterion.com]. A bit more hunting lead me to the Yahoo store of International Historical Films [ihffilm.com]…

I await my package with sweaty palms…

[Chinese] officials have been studying anti-corruption agencies elsewhere, notably in Hong Kong and Singapore, which rate highly in regional league tables of clean government. Singapore’s authoritarian tendencies and Hong Kong’s lack of democracy make them, for some Chinese officials, especially appealing models.

From Corruption in China: Not the Best Way to Clean Up [economist.com] in the Economist. (Subscription required)

(note: this was written while I was in Russia, I am back to Singapore now, but I had no internet access in Russia to post this)

I was supposed to be in Russia on Monday, March 26th. I left Haifa, Israel on Sunday the 25th at 10:30 in the morning. After a few hours on the road and the customary long and in-depth security check that is Ben Gorion airport I boarded a 6 hour flight to Moscow aboard Transaero (thinking as I did, “I hope this is not the newest incarnation of some crash prone communist airline”, my feeling not made better by the fact that the 737 didn’t have a single TV… not even in Business class—when was the last time you flew on a Boeing plane without a TV?)

I made it to Moscow fine… it was making it through immigration that things took a not so nice turn. It reminded me of the Fellowship of the Ring when Gandalf tells the Balrog: “You cannot pass!” Only this sounded more like “Neit!” Seems my visa was not valid… Now considering that this visa was issued by the Russian Embassy in Tel Aviv last week it would be reasonable to wonder what could possibly be wrong with the shinny new Russian Visa. Well… The visa was issues for April 3rd to April 26th, and of course Sunday was March 25th!

After spending a few hours getting the details settled and trying to find a way to fix this problem I paid my 2000 Rubble fine for trying to enter the country with an invalid visa and was escorted up to a sort of no-mans-land that is between the domestic arrivals and the transit lounge. Being about 20 feet on a side and having 10 or 15 communist era refugee chairs this kingdom of mine was a far cry from the lush lands Tom Hanks roamed in The Terminal—and there was a disturbing lack of Catherine Zeta Jones like companions.

After waiting 14 hours overnight in my over sized sanitarium cell I was escorted through the transit lounge and onto a return flight to Tel Aviv.

I spent the next night and day recovering (read eating and sleeping) from my almost-but-not-quite trip to Moscow while my visa was fixed and a new flight and hotel were booked. So late on Tuesday night I headed back to the airport and back aboard a Transaero plane for my second try at entering Russia.

And I’m in. No sweat this time.

My hotel is on the outskirts of Moscow far from the familiar sights of Red Square and the Kremlin, parts that might look familiar if you remember the end of the Bourne Identity or if you watched the Russian film Night Watch. The parts of Moscow I rode through looks every bit like the post-communism drunken capitalist war zone I heard horror stories of when I was a teen.

Miles and miles of low rise communist housing, steam pipes running along the sidewalks and over the roads. Everything has the same brown mud coating. That’s the communist backdrop against witch is set rampant capitalism; more billboards per mile than I’ve ever seen, expensive European cars clogging the roads (along side Soviet era duct tape and paper ‘cars’) Ads for high ends consumer electronics abound, the latest high end mobile phones and laptops are particularly common.

Of particular fun is the fact that after having passed through immigration and having a filled out and stamped exit card to return to them when I leave I still have to ‘register’ within three days of arrival. This is so when some cop or military type stops me and says ‘papers?’ I can show them that I am actually here legally and that I am registered. Why? I guess it’s a hold over from soviet days. Paranoid KGB types want to know what hotel all the foreigners are in but don’t have all the hotels wired to a central database yet.

And for those who are keeping score I have seen no cow weddings since I arrived

I’ve read this article [newstatesman.com] on the hidden cost of Americas new adventures in Mesopotamia before, but someone just forwarded it to me again.

It’s very depressing. Especially this part about the Middle East Marshal plan that could have been:

In their main paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz come up with [a better way the money could have been spent]: “We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds.”

What a historic triumph that would have been for Bush. Instead, his legacy to generations of Americans will be a needless debt of at least $2.5trn, what his own defence secretary describes as a four-way civil war in Iraq, dangerous instability in the Middle East, and increasingly entrenched hatred of the United States throughout the world.

I don’t think anyone in the current government—Republican or Democrat—can think like that. I don’t think most Americans can think like that and they would tar and feather—if not burn at the stake—anyone who suggested we give half a trillion dollars to a Middle East development effort that did not include gun toting patriotism and cheep oil. I think most Americans are generally uninterested in what happens in the Middle East unless some fear monger stands up and says that if we don’t do something we will have suicide bomber on the streets of rural America. I think most Americans compassion stops at the border. And most Americans don’t want to see a large amount of money go anywhere but back in their pockets.

I heard a speaker in collage say that “humanitarianism is the product of Western leisure time.” (I thought it was Desmond Tutu, but I can’t find a reference now). The logic of that statement strikes me as inescapable: who has the time to worry about people who might be starving or freezing to death halfway around the world when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, if it’s coming at all. However I think that America, at least those who are not millionaires, who don’t have charitable foundations named after them, has moved beyond caring about less fortunate people in other parts of the world. Caring for those outside of your own family is rare in America, caring for those outside your community, church, town or country amounts to “oh, thats horrible.” And it takes something like the Boxing Day Tsunami—something that killed a quarter or a million people to make us dig into our pockets.

If you drive a BMW, a Hummer, a Mercedes or the like, if you own a house, eat out a few times a month, take vacations then you have no excuse for not donating [brandeis.edu] a few hundred dollars a year to some charity. Try the Red Cross [icrc.org], Oxfam [oxfam.org.uk], or any number or others. There are many excuses why people don’t donate but they all break down into only a few reasons: you’re too poor, you’re too lazy, you don’t care, you never thought about it.

America does not give a lot of money as a country to humanitarian efforts, it used to be able to rely on the charity of it’s citizens and not have to. Today most of it’s citizens don’t give and the government has not picked up the slack. If we can spend $2.5 TRILLION on Iraq we should be able to spend more, as individuals and as a country, on humanitarianism.

I am currently in Israel for training on a new role in my current company. Three weeks of ‘training’ and then a week to explore the sights and sounds of the holy land. Candice will be joining me in my falafel eating enterprise for a week and we might even make a side trip to Istanbul—used to be Constantinople, why they changed it I can’t say [google.com]… :)

The experience of flying El Al was quite interesting. I thought Heathrow had security issues… The went through every piece of my luggage and repacked several of the carry on items in the checked luggage. On top of that they took several random things out of my luggage and carry on and said they ‘raised alarms’ so I got to answer all types of questions about my Gary Fong Light Sphere II [garyfonginc.com], my Flickr Minis [moo.com], a travel toiletries bag, and a 50mm Prime lens.

Then I got to sit next to a rather large Israelite who smelled like a chimney and sounded like he had TB… On top of that he had a bright and sunny personality and spoke only Hebrew… Makes for a wonderful 12 hours flight.

Anyway, I’m here now and don’t have to worry about anal probing security for the next four weeks. I hope to make it to Jerusalem on the weekend to take some photos and explore the markets.